To The Editors
In July of this year Dinitia Smith asked my publisher if she might interview me for the New York Times on my forthcoming book, Fugitive Days. From the start she questioned me sharply about bombings, and each time I referred her to my memoir where I discussed the culture of violence we all live with in America, my growing anger in the 1960s about the structures of racism and the escalating war, and the complex, sometimes extreme and despairing choices I made in those terrible times.

Smiths angle is captured in the Times headline: No regrets for a love of explosives (September 11, 2001). She and I spoke a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for ones life. I never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didnt do enough to stop the war.
Smith writes of me: Even today, he finds a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance, he writes. This fragment seems to support her love affair with bombs thesis, but it is the opposite of what I wrote:

Well bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general each describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. Boom. Boom. Boom. Poor Viet Nam. Almost four times the destructive power Florida How could we understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should we do about it? Bombs away. There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground. Nothing subtle or syncopated. Not a happy rhythm. Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. Dig up Florida and throw it into the ocean. Annihilate Chicago or London or Bonn. Three millioneach with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit, someone who knew him well or cared for her or counted on her for something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain. Each was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the earth, drying up, fading, and gone. Bodies torn apart, blown away, smudged out, lost forever.
I wrote about Vietnamese lives as a personal American responsibility, then, and the hypocrisy of claiming an American innocence as we constructed and stoked an intricate and hideous chamber of death in Asia. Clearly I wrote and spoke about the export of violence and the governments love affair with bombs. Just as clearly Dinitia Smith was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is not a question of being misunderstood or taken out of context, but of deliberate distortion.
Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by associating my book with them. This is absurd. My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results from it. We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people in other parts of the world as well as in the U.S. dying and suffering in response.

All that we witnessed September 11the awful carnage and pain, the heroism of ordinary peoplemay drive us mad with grief and anger, or it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more urgent now than ever.

Anti war protesting is one thing. putting innocent peoples' lives in jeopardy by indiscriminately placing bombs in rest rooms and the planning to detonate a bomb at a dance with the intent to kill is another.

Bill Ayers is a piece of shit coward who threw a fire bomb at a house occupied by a 9 year old kid. Real danger to the world that kid was huh? To echo the sentiment from another thread... someone ought to fire bomb his ass.

The day Bill Ayers separates his educational philosophy from that of Barack Obama's that is the day I will reconsider my opinion of both Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. The fact is what Bill Ayers did many years ago, from a personal stand point pales when compared to his radical views of education .

I want beginning teachers to resist, to rebel against all of it, to reject these clichés, to stand on their own feet, and to make their way toward the moral heart of teaching at its best. I want them to do what needs to be done&#8212;again and again&#8212;in order to achieve teaching as an enterprise whose largest purpose is to help every human being reach the full measure of his or her humanity. Teaching as humanization, teaching as a project whose irreducible goal is both further enlightenment for each and greater freedom for all&#8212;this is the priceless ideal I want beginning teachers to focus on. To adequately consider that ideal requires moving beyond the fog of the merely given, clearing a free space for challenging the dogma and the orthodoxy that attaches itself to teaching like barnacles, sharp and ugly.
To begin we have to refocus on teaching as intellectual and ethical work, something beyond the instrumental and the linear. We need to understand that teaching requires thoughtful, caring people to carry it forward successfully, and we need, then, to commit to becoming more caring and more thoughtful as we grow into our work. This refocusing requires a leaning outward, a willingness to look at the world of children&#8212;the sufferings, the accomplishments, the perspectives and the concerns&#8212;and an awareness, sometimes joyous, but just as often painful, of all that we find. And it requires, as well, a leaning inward&#8212;in-breathing, in-dwelling&#8212;traveling toward self-knowledge, a sense of being alive and conscious in a going world. In each direction, each gesture, we acknowledge that every person is entangled and propelled and sometimes made mute by a social surround, and that each has, as well, a wild and vast inner life&#8212;a spirit, a soul, a mind. Going inward without consciously connecting to a larger world leads to self-referencing and worse, narcissism as truth; traveling outward without noting your own embodied heart and mind can easily lead to ethical astigmatism, moral blindness&#8212;to seeing children as a collection of objects for use. William Ayers

This philosophy in learning which teaches social values over educational values, further dumbs down children and continues the process of creating generations of children that have no clue about the world that surrounds them. It makes them less competitive with other nations on puts young people on a bad footing in the job market. This educational philosophy has been praised not only by Barack Obama but if you read Barack Obama's educational plans it does not differ much from Willaim Ayers.

The day Bill Ayers separates his educational philosophy from that of Barack Obama's that is the day I will reconsider my opinion of both Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. The fact is what Bill Ayers did many years ago, from a personal stand point pales when compared to his radical views of education .

I want beginning teachers to resist, to rebel against all of it, to reject these clichés, to stand on their own feet, and to make their way toward the moral heart of teaching at its best. I want them to do what needs to be doneagain and againin order to achieve teaching as an enterprise whose largest purpose is to help every human being reach the full measure of his or her humanity. Teaching as humanization, teaching as a project whose irreducible goal is both further enlightenment for each and greater freedom for allthis is the priceless ideal I want beginning teachers to focus on. To adequately consider that ideal requires moving beyond the fog of the merely given, clearing a free space for challenging the dogma and the orthodoxy that attaches itself to teaching like barnacles, sharp and ugly.
To begin we have to refocus on teaching as intellectual and ethical work, something beyond the instrumental and the linear. We need to understand that teaching requires thoughtful, caring people to carry it forward successfully, and we need, then, to commit to becoming more caring and more thoughtful as we grow into our work. This refocusing requires a leaning outward, a willingness to look at the world of childrenthe sufferings, the accomplishments, the perspectives and the concernsand an awareness, sometimes joyous, but just as often painful, of all that we find. And it requires, as well, a leaning inwardin-breathing, in-dwellingtraveling toward self-knowledge, a sense of being alive and conscious in a going world. In each direction, each gesture, we acknowledge that every person is entangled and propelled and sometimes made mute by a social surround, and that each has, as well, a wild and vast inner lifea spirit, a soul, a mind. Going inward without consciously connecting to a larger world leads to self-referencing and worse, narcissism as truth; traveling outward without noting your own embodied heart and mind can easily lead to ethical astigmatism, moral blindnessto seeing children as a collection of objects for use. William Ayers

This philosophy in learning which teaches social values over educational values, further dumbs down children and continues the process of creating generations of children that have no clue about the world that surrounds them. It makes them less competitive with other nations on puts young people on a bad footing in the job market. This educational philosophy has been praised not only by Barack Obama but if you read Barack Obama's educational plans it does not differ much from Willaim Ayers.

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Horrifying-----here come the social engineers. We're screwed. America can't be run like it's a fricking hippie commune.

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